I am a great believer. In almost anything that involves food and joy. Which means that I celebrate Easter with as much enthusiasm as I do Diwali, Eid or Hanukkah. I light candles, diyas and lanterns with equal fervour and stir up as mean a paal payasam as I do a Christmas pudding. But for me Easter has special memories, as a time when I was younger, slimmer, happier and madder (yes, that is possible, I assure you).
Many years ago, when I was a child and lived occasionally in Europe (as it was then, not EU as it is now), Easter was unusual, to say the least. With American friends in a German town, it became a mish-mash of local tradition and foreign festivity, with Easter eggs mixed up with willow branches, mixed up with ‘bunny gardens’ mixed up with daffodils. There was marzipan and chocolate, pies and pastries, fresh bread and the equivalent of hot cross buns. And lots of children running egg races and doing egg hunts, cheered on by adults wearing absurd bunny ears and hopping around looking totally ridiculous and entirely charming.
When, as a somewhat older person I took off to live for a while in the United States as a college student, I had a readymade family to celebrate Easter with. I was – and still am, I am assured – their ‘Indian daughter’ and had, once their children had gone off to various colleges, my ‘own’ room, decorated with textiles from home. I was included in all the festivals that they took seriously and went to church services with perhaps more curious delight than I had ever shown apropos a temple visit. And we ate, lots of delicious food of uncertain provenance – since most Easter feasts were pot-luck events – that was all relished and polished off to the last crumb at the bottom of the serving dish.
One very early and astonishingly cold morning, I went with my ‘foster mum’ to an Easter service on the beach. The Long Island shore is chilly at almost every conceivable time of the year. With cold winds blowing in and even colder water lashing the painfully pebbled waterfront, it was not the most joyous occasion I had ever attended, but it had an eerie beauty and a strange spiritual ambience that could never have been matched by the more sheltered – and far warmer – environs of a chapel. We stood there with hair, coats and (if possible) goosebumps flying madly about, our teeth chattering as the pastor sped through the service and the seagulls fluttered overhead. If ever there was a reason to swig the brandy served up at the reverend’s house later, the frost glittering at the tips of my eyelashes was it, but my allergies intervened and hot chocolate was my antifreeze.
What came after was more my style. My ‘family’ gave me more chocolate than I could eat in the hour after I got back to my apartment, and for a few days after that I gorged my little stout self on chocolate eggs, marzipan flowers and….but no, there was a hitch to my happiness there. I had as part of my loot a large-ish chocolate rabbit, beady black eyes and all, with all his fur (I presumed it was a ‘he’, since he had that somewhat lecherous glint in his sugar-candy eyes) carefully detailed in swirls of sweet brown stuff. Every time I reached towards him to take a bite, I imagined him looking reproachfully at me.
It got so finely balanced that I could not even break off a ear to enjoy my favourite food in its purest avatar. The rabbit sat on my work-desk for days, even weeks, still in his little clear plastic box, staring sadly at me – which could have explained why that term paper was so late – until I could take it no longer. A friend came over, I explained the situation to him and he zapped my rabbit in the microwave oven until he was a puddle of warm chocolate in a soup bowl. And, once his beady little eyes were taken out and thrown away, I managed to do the dirty – I spooned up that lovely pool of sweetness with all the relish of a starving woman deprived of chocolate for too long.
Which is the best way to celebrate Easter, methinks.
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